Archive for the ‘Automation’ Category

There have been a handful of interesting article over the last week or two about online fulfillment centers. The first is from Bloomberg (Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading, Apr 5) and discusses how many firms have followed Amazon’s lead and have invested in robots to help run their fulfillment centers. (Recall that Amazon bought Kiva, which we have discussed before.)

One interesting point made in the article is that the automation may not be quite what you think. For example, these robots are not reaching and grabbing items from the shelves (form something like that, see here). Rather, they are working with human pickers who load them up and then let the robot carry items from storage shelves to the packing area. That is, the robots takeover time-consuming schlepping so that humans can focus on identifying the right item on the shelves. Check out this video.

This shows how Toys R Us fulfills its web orders. And, yes, that says that over 40% of the web sales were fulfilled from stores. (To put that total in perspective, the company’s revenue last year was $11.8 billion.) (more…)

Today is a big day for companies in the shipping business. Coming off of the last weekend before Christmas, it is not too surprising that the likes of UPS and FedEx are expecting a massive rush of packages ordered by everyone who gave up on the mall and just ordered it online. In case you couldn’t have guess that for yourself, both the New York Times (Crunch Time for FedEx and UPS as Last-Minute Holiday Shipping Ramps Up, Dec 21) and the Wall Street Journal (A Test for UPS: One Day, 34 Million Packages, Dec 21)have articles today about how shippers have planned to deal with the deluge.

For my money, the Journal article is more interesting if only because it contains nuggets like that e-commerce will soon account for half of all U.S. packages. This video summarizes some of the main points of the article.

We have posted a few times about how miserable it can be to work in an Amazon fulfillment center. (See for example here.) We have also had a few posts on Kiva robots — both before and after Amazon bought the company in 2012. Kiva produces automation systems for fulfillment centers. These are essentially robots that bring shelves to pickers who select what is needed to complete customer orders. At the time Amazon bought them, Kiva’s clients were firms like Crate & Barrel that while significant catalog/web retailers had far less variety than Amazon. Indeed, one of our posts on Kiva was basically asking when the robot hordes were coming to a fulfillment center near you.

According to the Wall Street Journal, those hordes have now arrived (Amazon Robots Get Ready for Christmas, Nov 19). Back in May, CEO Jeff Bezos claimed that they would increase their number of robots from 1,400 to 10,000 over the year. What difference does this change make?

At a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in Tracy, Calif., about 60 miles east of San Francisco, Amazon this summer replaced four floors of fixed shelving with the robots, the people said.

Now, “pickers” at the facility stand in one place and wait for robots to bring four-foot-by-six-foot shelving units to them, sparing them what amounted to as much as 20 miles a day of walking through the warehouse. Employees at some robot-equipped warehouses are expected to pick and scan at least 300 items an hour, compared with 100 under the old system, current and former workers said.

The history of manufacturing is to some extent the history of substituting capital for labor. Devising a way of making things that is more reliant on equipment (or an organizing principle like the Ford assembly line) allows workers to be more productive and generate more output per hour worked. But capital requires, you know, capital. Adding new equipment like robots requires an upfront investment and having that investment payoff depends on scale at which the business operates. Big firms like Roger-&-Me era GM can afford robots even if they have limited capabilities but smaller firms have a harder time taking the plunge. Until now that is, if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed (Robots Work Their Way Into Small Factories, Sep 17).

Robots have been on factory floors for decades. But they were mostly big machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had to be caged off to keep them from smashing into humans. Such machines could only do one thing over and over, albeit extremely fast and precisely. As a result, they were neither affordable nor practical for small businesses.

Collaborative robots can be set to do one task one day—such as picking pieces off an assembly line and putting them in a box—and a different task the next. …

Why invest in automation? The answer to that question is often to cut cost — a straight up move to replace labour with capital. That has the obvious implication that firms in high-wage locales like the US should be willing to invest heavily in fancy machinery while those in lower-wage countries like India should be more cautious in doing so. That may not always hold, however. As the Wall Street Journal tells it, there is one Indian industry that is investing heavily in automation and it’s not really about shaving costs. The industry in question is generic pharmaceuticals and the driving force behind the capital investments is maintaining high quality standards (India’s Drug Makers Move Toward Automation, Jun 5).

Despite an abundance of low-cost laborers in India, all of [Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories’] plants are moving toward fully automating their production process “to avoid good manufacturing practice pitfalls from regulators,” said Samiran Das, head of Dr. Reddy’s generic drugs manufacturing.

In the past decade, India’s pharmaceutical companies have blossomed into multibillion-dollar companies that now account for 40% of the generic drugs sold in the U.S. Those companies, however, have come under increased scrutiny in recent years from the U.S. FDA, for manufacturing, testing and other safety issues that are often the result of human error.

To ensure that their products don’t get banned from the U.S.—the world’s biggest drug market—many companies that can afford it are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to automate. …

Mr. Venkatanaryan, the head of the Dr. Reddy’s Bachupally plant, says the drive toward automation is meant to make the manufacturing process “mistake-proof.”

There has been a lot written recently about the state and future of making stuff in the US. Just in the past month, Strategy & Business has touted new technology and software as a way forward for American manufacturing (America’s Real Manufacturing Advantage, Jan 20) while Steven Rattner, the administration’s former Car Czar, took the New York Times pooh-poohing talk of a revitalized manufacturing base (The Myth of Industrial Rebound, Jan 25). As Rattner sees it, whatever boost there has been in manufacturing has been inconsequential and not beneficial for workers.

But we need to get real about the so-called renaissance, which has in reality been a trickle of jobs, often dependent on huge public subsidies. Most important, in order to compete with China and other low-wage countries, these new jobs offer less in health care, pension and benefits than industrial workers historically received. …

This disturbing trend is particularly pronounced in the automobile industry. When Volkswagen opened a plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., in 2011, the company was hailed for bringing around 2,000 fresh auto jobs to America. Little attention was paid to the fact that the beginning wage for assembly line workers was $14.50 per hour, about half of what traditional, unionized workers employed by General Motors or Ford received.

With benefits added in, those workers cost Volkswagen $27 per hour. Consider, though, that in Germany, the average autoworker earns $67 per hour. In effect, even factoring in future pay increases for the Chattanooga employees, Volkswagen has moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).

This all gets us to a different New York Times on Harley Davidson that describes changes the firm made to save itself (Building a Harley Faster, Jan 28). What is interesting is that Harley’s approach differs fundamentally from either of the approaches above. They are relying on humans over widespread automation and working with their existing, unionized workforce as opposed to hightailing it to a location with cheaper labor. (more…)